Inside the Billion Dollar Celebrity Impersonation Scam

From the article:

I learned from talking to West, the California prosecutor, that the Keanu Reeves scammer I was communicating with as Linda was likely a non-native English speaker using AI voice technology to impersonate Reeves. He is probably a victim himself, likely based in Southeast Asia. He may have found himself messaging a fake gray-haired lady in California who loves Keanu Reeves after responding to a seemingly legitimate job listing in a country like Thailand. When he went to the job interview, human traffickers would have kidnapped him, confiscated his passport, brought him across the border into Myanmar, Cambodia or Laos and imprisoned him in a compound, where he works 16-hour days reading from scripts written by experts in human psychology. “This is industrialized scam,” says West, who has created an international law enforcement coalition called Operation Shamrock to try to shut down these types of large-scale frauds. “It’s a growing industry, and it’s growing because it works.”